Blog

Collections volunteer Robert Blythe writes about photographer Raeburn Flerlage, who captured the blues and folk scenes in 1960s Chicago. If you’re a fan of American roots music, then the Chicago History Museum’s Raeburn Flerlage collection is a must-see. Ray, as he was known, spent much of the 1960s taking candid photographs in Chicago’s premier blues More

Hector Gonzalez is the gallery engagement lead for Race: Are We So Different? from November 2017 until July 2018. In this blog post, he reflects on his experience thus far. My time in the Race: Are We So Different? exhibition brings up mixed emotions. Yes, it is a very powerful experience and has confirmed that More

Ethan Michaeli. The Defender: How the Legendary Black Newspaper Changed America from the Age of the Pullman Porters to the Age of Obama. New York, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company (2016). This history is beautifully written and exquisitely researched. More

CHM archives intern Ashley Clark worked with archivist Julie Wroblewski to process the papers of John A. McDermott, a local leader in race relations and urban affairs from the 1960s into the 1990s. This past fall, I had the opportunity to process the John A. McDermott papers at the Chicago History Museum. I had processed More

As part of Monday Night Nitrates, our new weekly photograph series, the Chicago History Museum collections staff is blogging about the process of digitizing approximately 35,000 nitrate negatives. In this post, former CHM photographer Joseph Aaron Campbell writes about the painstaking task of converting analog negatives to digital images. The task of digitizing this nitrate More